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The Biz
Protecting the Customers
There's always been an idea in the analyst business that analysts ought to be something like Consumer Reports, a trustworthy source of
independent information. Anybody who's been in the
business long enough knows, however, that there isn't
enough consumer money out there to fund that kind of objectivity. The only kind of analyst business that allows the analysts to live comfortably in expensive suburbs is the business that takes money from the vendors.
As you know, B2B Analysts, Inc., doesn't do this. At the same time, we try not to be too holier than thou. People have to live, after all. Besides, 99% of all analysts feel that they can manage to do what they do ethically, balancing the demands of the vendors against the demands of truth and the consumer in a fair and reasonable way. Maybe it isn't what Consumer Reports does, but after all, this is the software business.
Then, every so often, we step back and wonder. Most recently, what gave us pause was the analyst community reaction
to what Oracle calls "SAP's upgrade fees," the charges that SAP levies to "upgrade"
their software contract, a fee that must be paid if you want to move to later versions of the software.
Oracle doesn't usually try to make a fair and balanced case when talking about SAP, but in this case they seem to have gotten it pretty much right.
SAP is charging an extra fee to customers, who are already paying maintenance fees, which they have to pay if they want to upgrade their software.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time last winter asking
SAP for some explanation of this. Analyst relations simply
blew me off, telling me that their experts didn't have
time to answer questions like this. The silly and implausible "explanations" that they did try to supply were simply embarrassing. Evidently, this was the first even semi-critical reaction to the levying of these fees.
Now, if there were even a strong streak of independence in the analyst community, I would have expected a storm of protest.
Au contraire. At least one leader at a major analyst firm had
the gall to stand up and defend this.
By now, of course, it's a dead issue. Oracle has gone on to other ways of criticizing SAP. Most customers have apparently paid the tax and upgraded their contracts (even though they haven't upgraded the software). So maybe the analyst community was right. Maybe it wasn't a big enough issue
to risk the huge fees from SAP over.
But if not that, then what?
The Biz is
sent out free by e-mail to the B2B community.
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